Help me find a cool little unix http utility I can't remember!

June 23, 2007 11:37 PM

I saw a really cool unix utility the other day blogged about somewhere, that in addition to some little boring http-ey tasks I can't remember, it also served as a tiny little HTTP-server-in-a-pinch like so: ./magicutil file.tar and boom, http://localhost/file.tar is alive. What was it!? Note: please don't try to find something that can /probably/ do this or show me a cool python script that will - this did some other cool stuff too I can't remember!
posted by floam to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Hey! all mine linebreaks died.
posted by floam at 11:37 PM on June 23, 2007

It was probably netcat.
posted by hades at 12:06 AM on June 24, 2007

Scratch that. While netcat could certainly be used to make a tiny http server (among many, many other uses), it wouldn't be quite as simple as that.
posted by hades at 12:16 AM on June 24, 2007

Wbox - http://hping.org/wbox/.It looks very cool - added it to my delicious acct immediately when I saw it last week.
posted by rsanheim at 1:13 AM on June 24, 2007

thttpd without any arguments will start thttpd with the docroot in the current dir

and webfs also acts in a similar manner

both of those can be found via apt
posted by mulligan at 1:26 AM on June 24, 2007

You can use python to do this without running a script. Just type this at the command line:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Voila, current directory served up over HTTP on localhost:8000.
posted by aparrish at 5:16 AM on June 24, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

I use mini_httpd for this. Same author as thttpd, but minier.
posted by Nelson at 9:14 AM on June 24, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Maybe you mean BusyBox?

It has compact versions of pretty much every *nix command, and the "httpd" one (look here and search on httpd) seems like it would do something similar to what you're after?
posted by jon4009 at 9:57 AM on June 24, 2007

Aha! Wbox was it, thanks!
posted by floam at 1:45 PM on June 24, 2007